2001

Killer Joe
by Tracy Letts

Brink Productions
with State Theatre Company
Space, June 2001

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Brink Productions are back, this time in co-production with State Theatre, for Tracy Letts’s Killer Joe, a grim little dog-eat-rottweiler saga about the Smith family.

Buried alive in a trailer park on the margins of Dallas, Texas, are Ansel and his second wife Sharla, and, from a previous marriage, son Chris and twelve year old daughter Dottie. Chris, in deep to …

2 May, 2001

Murray Bramwell

House Among the Stars
by Michel Tremblay.
State Theatre Company of South Australia
The Playhouse. Until 12 May, 2001

State Theatre’s newest production, House Among the Stars, from prolific French Canadian writer Michel Tremblay, is set in a log cabin in rural Quebec-“at the beginning of a beautiful evening in July.” In fact, it is set in three Julys- one in 1910, one in 1950 and a third, forty years on, in 1990. Three generations …

2000

The Taming of the Shrew
by William Shakespeare
State Theatre South Australia
Playhouse, November 2000

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

There is nothing else in all of Shakespeare that has caused the sort of qualms that The Taming of the Shrew has over the past twenty years or so. The subduing of the fiery Katherina by her mocking suitor Petruchio and the proofs of her obedience in the final scene have not been welcome spectacles in a time when equality …

2000

Sweet Road
by Debra Oswald

State Theatre South Australia
and Playbox
Space, September 2000

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Life, as everyone from your aromatherapist to your personal trainer will tell you, is a journey. We are all out there, pounding away on the four lane black top. That is, when we are not cruising the information superhighway or moping about the road not taken. In popular culture the open vista has beckoned everyone from Jack Kerouac to Toad of …

2000

Equus

by Peter Shaffer

State Theatre South Australia

Optima Playhouse

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Peter Shaffer wrote Equus several years after a friend told him about a crime committed by a young man. The friend  knew none of the particulars, only that a stable had been invaded and horses had been mutilated. Shaffer’s informant  died some months after and the playwright was unable to find out anything further. The image stayed in his mind, though, and he wrote an …

2000

How I Learned to Drive

by Paula Vogel

State Theatre South Australia

Space

Secret Bridemaids’ Business

by Elizabeth Coleman

Playbox with State Theatre

Optima Playhouse

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

In How I learned to Drive, American  playwright  Paula Vogel uses humour as a vehicle, you might say. And with it she takes us down some pretty dodgy back roads. If anyone were to tell you that this is a play about the intimate relationship between a seventeen year old …

2000

How I Learned to Drive

by Paula Vogel

State Theatre South Australia

Space

Secret Bridemaids’ Business

by Elizabeth Coleman

Playbox with State Theatre

Optima Playhouse

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

In How I learned to Drive, American  playwright  Paula Vogel uses humour as a vehicle, you might say. And with it she takes us down some pretty dodgy back roads. If anyone were to tell you that this is a play about the intimate relationship between a seventeen year old …

Blithe Spirit
by Noel Coward
State Theatre South Australia
Optima Playhouse

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

It is a strange shift from the contemporary theatrical idiom of Festival
productions like Iets op Bach, Ur/faust and Cortese’s Roulette to the stagey drawing room manners of Blithe Spirit. This is not to say that Noel Coward’s other-worldly comedy, written in six days in May, 1941 and performed in London nearly two thousand times from 1941 to 1946 is not worth the revival. But …

Closer
Patrick Marber
State Theatre
Space, August, 1999.
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Playwright Patrick Marber has described Closer as Noel Coward for the Nineties. It is an astute and useful, if not entirely modest, remark identifying the shrewd blend of wit and acerbic social observation that marks it as a comedy of manners. Because, beneath the spray of its contemporary realist profanity, Closer has a highly wrought and elegant structure.

Set in London, Marber’s play follows the lives of four …